I noticed some strange behavior regarding the Populist badge. Here is the question where it happened for reference, link. Disclaimer: I'm not out to get anyone and none of these people did anything wrong, I just want bring this behavior to light in case it's should be changed.
Normally what happens is that someone accepts an answer and it's ok, then someone else comes along and have an amazing or more general answer and get voted way past the accepted answer and gets the Populist badge. At least to my understanding.
What happened here though is that this one person got over 30 votes quickly, however I didn't accept his answer because reasons. Later that day I got and accepted an answer which had no votes yet. Currently that accepted answer has 76 votes to the other guy with only 54. So the accepted answer is currently bigger by about 40%.
What's weird here is it that the guy with 54 votes got the Populist badge. The behavior makes sense from the description, however it still feels wrong. The reason he got it is that when the accepted answer was on its way up it had to pass 11 votes anyway giving the current top-rated answer (which was above 22) the Populist badge. But he wouldn't be the populist here, he was just early. This wasn't over a long period either, just 2 days.
Maybe there should be put a time limit like a week or a month on how long the top-voted answer have to stay ahead of the accepted answer to gain the badge?